alistair - Slashdot User

DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo 201

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday December 03, 2009 @02:20AM from the shadows-with-shadows dept.

MojoKid writes "The PC demo for Codemasters' upcoming DirectX 11 racing title, Dirt 2, has just hit the web and is available for download. Dirt 2 is a highly-anticipated racing sim that also happens to feature leading-edge graphic effects. In addition to a DirectX 9 code path, Dirt 2 also utilizes a number of DirectX 11 features, like hardware-tessellated dynamic water, an animated crowd and dynamic cloth effects, in addition to DirectCompute 11-accelerated high-definition ambient occlusion (HADO), full floating-point high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, and full-screen resolution post processing. Performance-wise, DX11 didn't take its toll as much as you'd expect this early on in its adoption cycle." Bit-tech also took a look at the graphical differences, arriving at this conclusion: "You'd need a seriously keen eye and brown paper envelope full of cash from one of the creators of Dirt 2 to notice any real difference between textures in the two versions of DirectX."

Comment Battery Concerns (Score 2, Interesting) 364

by alistair on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @05:12AM (#28539913) Attached to: Some Overheating 3GS iPhones Glow Pink

Having just upgraded from the first iPhone to the 3GS I have to say I am disappointed with the battery life on the new handset, it's certainly not the improvement I was expecting from reviews. With Wi-Fi and location services turned off and very light usage I can get just about 2 days out of it, normal use sees it being recharged every night which is inferior to the old model. I was contemplating returning it to O2 but before I did that I wanted to know if there are any standard tests to see if my battery is that much worse than normal, e.g. the phone plays a movie for 5.5 hours at 75% brightness or play music through headphones for 9 hours from full charge etc. Any thoughts? Reviews also seemed to suggest there was a better battery meter in this model but I haven't seen it, 20% charge remaining still seems to mean run for a recarger, not you have 20% of the usage time you would get from a full charge left.

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